I can tell, because most of the time, my daily posts will outstrip the posts about bio-data information during the week, then lag behind over the weekend when I’m not posting. It’s always neck-and-neck, down to the wire, but my posts are usually more popular in terms of views on a daily basis than the bio stuff.

Not so lately, though. This week, the wedding resumes are more popular by a fair stretch. Today (as I write this, which is a Wednesday), it’s a 33% margin of lead.

I get over a hundred views a day now pretty consistently, but I owe most of that to the personal and professional bio-data information I compiled last year. If I remove that from my blog (and don’t think I haven’t considered it), I wonder where I’ll end up? Probably something more akin to what I have on my fiction blog (which ain’t much, rarely more than five and never consistent).

It’s been sort of tricky for me to figure out what would drive traffic to my blog over the time I’ve been interested in that. For one thing, I don’t have a consistent topic about which I blog. For another, my search terms were always slanted toward the personal CV stuff because I mentioned it in a post once. Since it was ticking me off, I decided to give ’em what they want, and now, I have no other search terms at all bringing people to my blog.

Nothing wrong with being focused, I guess, and having a targeted audience. That just isn’t the one I wanted.

Here’s a few things, if you’re interested, that I found in my research to drive traffic to your blog:

Comment on other blogs. Folks who see your comments around the blogosphere will follow you home, so to speak.

Join a forum. Got a hobby or interest you like blogging about? Find a forum about that topic, comment and post, and put your blog address in your signature. Voila, more hits.

Put your blog address in your signature on your emails and anywhere else you might correspond or be seen. Your Twitter profile for instance, or your Facebook or MySpace page.

Make sure you link to other blogs similar to yours or of interest to you and your intended audience. Also communicate with similarly targeted bloggers and see about exchanging links and link-backs.

I apologize if this post is incoherent and rambling. I’m on some strange cold medicine combinations. ~k

P.S. What’s up with the new logo? You should start a gallery of all your past logos.

First, feel free to ramble; that’s fine. It’s not a topical blog, like I said, so there’s no reason for anyone else to stay on point with a particular subject anyway. Second, I like making new banners. It’s fun and gives me something to do besides write. Y’know. And finally, those are pretty mild search terms. Keep blogging, you’ll see them get much weirder.

I dont get the bio data info stuff and do you add the RSS feed button and how does that help. How does the bio data info help and is that something you invented..k is that enough questions…..Zman sends

Well, I wrote a post asking what a “bio-data” was. A company I was applying to suggested writing one and using that as a technical writing sample. I realize now how goofy that is, but at the time, I had no idea. Thereafter, I got search terms bringing people to my blog looking for information on “bio-data” stuff. I did some research and found that a bio-data is really a resume with a lot more personal information, from hobbies to clubs and such things. Here in the US, they’re not commonly used because hiring managers don’t care about your family history, hobbies or things that don’t directly impact how you’ll do your job. But in other places, there are variances on bio-data sheets used for everything from applying to jobs to proposals for marriage. Specifically in India this is a common practice. That’s what the “bio-data” stuff is all about.

Does it help? I don’t know, but once in a while I’ll get a comment saying it was useful and helpful. One lady who specializes in that sort of thing found my site and chimed in with some information, too. So I guess it’s helping, but no, I didn’t invent it. You can bet if I had I’d be chargin’ for it and making a li’l dough now. 🙂

As for RSS feeds, in your WordPress dashboard under “Appearance” there’s a place for you to add widgets. One of the widgets is an RSS feed button. People can click on it and get your posts in their feed readers or news readers, like Google Reader. I’ve found several places that make the recommendation to add it to your sidebar and you’ll generate more traffic. If people like what they read, they’ll subscribe and follow your blog. So that’s that.

Oddly enough I saw in increase in traffic to my blog when I posted the horror story GRANNY PANTIES. When I did a search I found that I was being noticed by a lot of fetish sites.

Yeah, that’ll do it.

And you are right sir, I have tried to meet other bloggers, not just to swap ideas but also to hopefully entice the curious.

(ohpleaseohplease come vist. I’m so lonley!)

Yeah, that was me. And I found most of them only came back once or twice. Only a couple of ’em turned out to be blogulars.

One of the things that helped me was that I caught a small amount of notice when I contributed to the survival horror rpg ALL FLESH MUST BE EATEN which made a lot of folks notice my writing.

Then of course I posted a story one of my odd gaming experiences and it became one of the most passed around stories ever (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12210). I meant it to be off joke but it became a series of essays that were followed pretty regularly- they even got turned into podcast radio plays and translated into Spanish by fans.

Hey, congrats! Pretty cool!

I think that are one of the reasons why my web page gets a steady 20 or sits a day whereas my blog’s hits are decidedly bi-polar. Still though my hits are spread pretty nicely around the world the world. Apparently I am big in Finland, Britain and Sweden- not too shabby.

Not at all!

Also speaking of your stories- I have to say that the one you did about the door to Hell was, as the kids say, da bomb.

Great tips! I get very few hits via my direct blog link and it’s plastered all over the web. On WordPress I can’t use meta tags, which would boost SEO. I get more hits from searches, usually very strange ones like “man leaning”. I know, that’s weird, right? Who would look that up in the first place? But what’s more strange is my blog was found repeatedly through that for like six weeks. At least once a day. I tried to find my blog through that with different search engines, thinking maybe I was at the top, but I couldn’t find my blog at all.

My wife once started getting search terms for “butterfly pictures” and for that week or so her hits were around 400+ a day. It was wild. Then Google or whoever fixed it and she dropped like a stone down to her normal figures again. But she was pretty excited for a while there.

I only get an average of 25 hits a day.

You know, I should check my stats page and see what the average per day is. The count plummets on weekends.

I’m on Twitter, Technorati and Digg and have no idea how to utilize any of those sites.

I’ve been looking at Twitter as an abbreviate chat program, but I can’t see how to use it as a networking tool. Not yet, anyway. I only have about 15 followers, for Pete’s sake. I signed up for Facebook but UGH. I hate it.

Okay. You need to stop with the header changes. Every time you get one I love, you change it. This one is kinda blah. Not your best. Maybe that’s how you’re feeling. Kinda blah. You’re totally addicted. I can tell.

I am. I love making them. This one was cool to me for its subtlety. I liked the last one too though. Making the change was tough.

That’s helpful info. A lot of people ask why no one is commenting on their blogs. I believe that they don’t get comments because they wait for it. They don’t go out there and comment on other people’s blogs and let the blogosphere know a new blogger has just arrived and kickin’. Some are too lazy to visit other blogs and read what other people have to say so they shouldn’t expect a favor if one should only comment “Nice blog.”

I usually just ignore people with “Nice blog.” comments. They make me crazy! I mean, I wrote more than one paragraph in my blog and they’re just gonna reply with a phrase. I mean, ever heard of reading?

Well, that’s true; you should be willing to give as good as you get. For a lot of people, it’s a time thing. If they went around and left in-depth comments on every blog they read they’d have no time to do much of anything else. So it’s necessary for practicality to be selective about commenting.

My blog traffic is few and far between. But there is one poetry post about patriotism that consistently draw hits from search engines. This year-old post accounts for 20-30% of daily traffic. I could not discern why. I guess a lot of people love their country?

Yeah, you are right but they shouldn’t have left comments at all if they’re not going to read even just one or two sentences. I’m talking about those people who go to your blog and just comment “Nice blog” and leave links to their blogs lol. No sign of reading! I blogged about blogging (lol) in my latest entry so check it out if you have time.

WordPress is great about catching those comments and flagging them as spam, so you can eliminate them if you want. You can also use comment moderation to stop them. I’ll check your blog out right now. 🙂

I do visit a log of blogs and leave comments if there is something I think I can add. I try not to ‘troll’ for attention- that never seems to work for me anyway.

That’s one thing that holds me back from speaking up a lot too — I just don’t have anything to say worth contributing.

I’m not sure how much sex can be used to get real traffic though, chapter 4 of my serial novel got a little hot but it didn’t seem to get as many hits as some of my PRICE BREAKS AND HEART ACHES stories or, God help us, GRANNY PANTIES.

I haven’t done straight erotica in a while… I could probably outdo Anita Blake if I needed to…